Aditya Bardia, MD, MPH, attending physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, discusses COVID-19 (Coronavirus) risk in patients with cancer and the elderly.

We don't have the answers yet in terms of how COVID-19 will impact immunocompromised patients. We do know from what was seen in China that elderly patients were the ones who were at higher risk of having a more serious infection. One can anticipate that immunocompromised patients might also have a more severe form of infection.

Having said that, there's a lot of development that's going on in terms of developing assays to detect this disease earlier. And [there's] also a lot of work being done on vaccines. So there's a lot of work being done which could change the natural history of this disease.

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COVID-19 and Cancer: Oncologist Shares His View

Physicians are looking for a way to further classify the tumors of patients with triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), but some of the sub-classifications they have come up with are not actionable in the clinic yet, according to Adity Bardia, MD, MPH.

TNBC is difficult to classify into subgroups but finding a way to do so can help physicians narrow their treatment options, but there is not enough research to determine which treatment options should be used based on these subgroups. Bardia, attending physician of medical oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital, had the chance to speak with OncLive®, a sister publication to 

 Chemotherapy Foundation Symposium, hosted by PER®, on why these classifications do not have an impact in the clinic yet.

The majority of triple-negative breast cancers are basal, but you can also have tumors that are luminal A or luminal B. They're have also been attempts to subclassify even this basal subgroup into BL1 or BL2, but the important question to consider is, is it actionable? If I were to classify triple-negative breast cancer based on say FAM50, luminal A plus basal, does it have an impact on my clinical decision making?

And at this time, we don't have that evidence, and that's why this classification is not used in the clinic. The ER-positive, HER2-positive and triple-negative breast cancer classification is used in the clinic because it's actionable. If a tumor is ER-positive you can use endocrine therapy, if it's HER2-positive you can use anti-HER2 therapy, and for the rest, it's either chemotherapy or a clinical trial.

While physicians are looking to further subclassify TNBC to narrow treatment options, not all of these classifications are actionable in the clinic.

Aditya Bardia, MD, MPH

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COVID-19 and Cancer: Oncologist Shares His View

Utilizing Actionable Classifications in TNBC